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| Home - International Gates and Profiles, Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil |
||
| Pedro Paulo de Santos is the night watchman on
the street where I live. The street is cast with the draping branches
of what I imagine to be mango trees. The asphalt is caked in star
shaped leaves veined with red. It is a narrow street with two and
three story houses of pastel yellow and blue exteriors where upper
middle to upper class Brazilians and cariocas live. I am living with
a middle aged graphic designer who does solo work and supports himself
simply. Each house is bordered with a gate, no more then six feet
tall, painted in more shades of bluegreen. This is a quiet neighborhood,
nestled in the floresta of Rio’s zona sulinha, and the residents
have painted their gates with colors that invite the eye. They have
taken that care. In other neighborhoods, the gates are scarred with
grey silver scratches, cast in the noonday shade of a massive apartment
building, or written over crudely in black tar and apelidos from spray
cans. Here, the tip of each stalk of each gate has not been sharpened.
The plaster walls that divide gate from gate are not woven with barbed
wire or a montage of broken beer bottles, a florescent dull green
collage of shards to scar pigeon claws and young hands looking to
climb over those borders. I remember my first day in Rio. I remember noticing how even the higher floors of taller buildings had a black scrawl on their windowpanes, how each spear of the gates stretched at least ten feet, and how some residents-inmates had taken to gluing glass to their own window sills and balconies. “Who wrote that graffiti, who climbed six stories, what if they were caught. What if they were….” shot down from their perch. Young black men for the most part. Pedro lumps them together as marginals. I ask that question of the son of the family with whom I am staying during my first walk through his streets. Copacabana seems to be a sea of faces veiled in the exhaust of laneless roads, large buses, chipped marble tiles. The ocean is three blocks away from their home. And beyond that? He is a quiet young man who answers my questions thoughtfully. He is majoring in engineering at the federal university of Rio de Janeiro, far away from here. Past the Zona Sul and its ‘security’. His mother, Dona Antonia, is a widow who guards the memory of her husband in the Isaac Bashevis Singer books that he left behind for her, translated in Portuguese. “I don’t know what happens, I’ve never seen it happen.” We buzz for the doorman to let us into the building. The gate swings open. I spend only one month in Copacabana. I have little idea who my night watchman is. The doorman is an older man who looks nordestino with glasses and fine grey hair. He opens the gate for me soundlessly. Rio de Janeiro is a beautiful city. It has sweeping hills and ocean. Rio de Janeiro is a city of remorseless violence and racism. Define violence broadly: the lack of schools, hospitals, draining, basic sanitation, earnest, non-violent police (if there is such a thing). All these are absent in low-income communities of color that light up the night time in the zona sul for the tourists eye, a constellation of small lanterns and track lighting stretching from each brick house, wooden wall, aluminum roof. Rio de Janeiro, Brasil is a city of stark segregation and borders. They are permeable borders that are meant to be crossed for periods of time. The doormen and security guards of my home are black and “yellow” men from the northeast who live in the outlying sub·rbios or the northern and western zones of the city. Pedro lives with an extended family in a house built by hand. His commute is tiresome. Up at the crack of dawn and home at dusk for the dayshift. Invert the light for the nightshift. But it is a decent living. And for those hours, he, as a worker, is a legitimate part of the gated community. One could say he has a passport of sorts, marked for a specific task and time and place. Once could say, for those hours, he has an adequate response to the profile of potential threat that his appearance may convey to others. He has a vest that says seguranÁa on the back. He has an adequate response to the men who keep the borders in place, who protect and serve a supposed indivisible public citizen. Pedro would not say it like that. He is the protector. The safeguard. The border control. In service of my block. To protect against eager climbers, beggars, writers, stick-up kids. And those who resemble their image. Pedro makes his profile from experience. He says that there is no racism based on being black in Brazil. He tells me that the job of a seguranàa is a special one, because he must be able to see the inside of a person and not the surface. He must be able to judge whether a person is good or bad through his own perception and intuition. Pedro was born and raised in the Baixada Fluminense, in a series of neighborhoods of color, which is to say, neighborhoods where mostly Afro-Brazilians and Indio-Brazilians, from many generations and many different geographical origins within Brazil, live. Pedro has a gentle smile. He tells me that the job of seguranÁa is never-ending because criminals are born from cycles of systematic inequality and neglect that are not resolved by higher walls and sharper gates and more segurancas. He says that he does his best to separate the qualidades from the defeitos of a person and that he shows a kind and respectful side before any intimidation or violence. He says that only god can protect but, at the least, he can inhibit an act of violence before it happens. Pedro constructs his profile with care. My friends fit his profile, but I say nothing. Pedro treats me kindly, and I listen to his words. They roll into me like silk. I feel something tear. And then just a numb, sleepy sadness. Back to top |
